What Is Our Definition of Spam?

OnlyMyEmail's definition of Spam closely follows the laws that prohibit unwanted broadcast faxes, though the term Spam itself only applies to email.

The most significant characteristics of Spam are simply that the email is:

1. Mass mailed
2. Commercial in nature
3. Not requested by the recipient
4. Sent without a prior business relationship

While there are other criteria useful in making a determination, if the above conditions are true, then OnlyMyEmail's filters will generally delete such messages as Spam.

Notice: While the CAN-SPAM Act permits un-requested commercial emails as long as there is no deception and there is a functional method for "opting out" of future emails, and further exempts certain categories of emails (campaign messages sent by political candidates, for instance) OnlyMyEmail does not consider such factors.

A few common scenarios to help further define and apply these tests:

• Scenario: An acquaintance sends a joke or urban legend to everyone in their address book. While receiving such emails might be annoying, they are not considered Spam because there is no commercial purpose to the emails.
• Scenario: You visit a web site and request "more information" about a product or service, and you continue to receive email from the site on a regular basis. Since you initiated contact and provided your email address, this is not Spam by our definition, but is instead legitimate Direct Marketing. However, if you attempt to "unsubscribe" from receiving these communications, then future emails would qualify as Spam.
• Scenario: You have made a purchase from a company, and even after the transaction is complete, you continue to receive promotional emails from them. Because a previous business relationship exists this will ordinarily not be considered spam, but is instead legitimate Direct Marketing. However, if you attempt to "unsubscribe" from receiving these communications, then future emails would qualify as Spam.
• Scenario: You receive commercial email solicitations that you have not requested, and where you have not previously conducted business with the owner of the web site. Because there is no prior business relationship and the email is commercial in nature, this is definitely Spam by our definition.

While there will always be some instances that defy easy classification, these guidelines and examples will accurately classify spam in the vast majority of cases.

How Can You Reduce Your Spam Exposure?

While OnlyMyEmail's service will intercept the vast majority of unsolicited junk email that is sent to your account, there a few things that you can do to minimize the amount of unwanted incoming messages.

Conceal Your Address on Web Sites

One of the spammer's best weapons is what's commonly known as an address harvesting bot that scours the Internet and extracts any email addresses openly displayed on web sites.

If you have your own web site, be sure to use the OnlyMyEmail Encoder to prevent these address harvesters from capturing your email addresses.

Be Careful With Your Address

Clearly, signing up for contests, sweepstakes and other online marketing promotions will no doubt result in your email address being used for mass-marketing campaigns.

While most people realize this, fewer understand that placing your email address on a web site (which includes many user-groups, news-groups and other web-based discussions) will also likely result in your account receiving quite a bit of spam.

This is because web-browsing software has been developed for the sole purpose of reading web pages and extracting any email addresses that are found.

If you must post your email address on a web site, it's considered a good practice to disguise the address by replacing the "@" sign with some other characters.

For instance, if you display your address as "Jones-AT-Earthlink.net" most humans can figure out your address if they wish to write you, but this will successfully fool the majority of automated email extraction software programs.

Protect Your Friend's Addresses

If you're sending friends and acquaintances web-based greeting cards, signing them up for online contests, forwarding news articles, maps, or commercial emails or giving out their email addresses to Web sites for any reason whatsoever, then you're simply turning them over to the junk marketers.

No matter how innocent a web site may sound, if they ask for the email addresses of your friends, then they're generally going to use those addresses to send unwanted junk email, and they'll probably use yours too!

Even worse, the addresses collected from such activities are generally sold to other mass-marketers, so volunteering an email address in this way can ultimately result in thousands upon thousands of junk email solicitations sent to both you and your friends.

Keep in mind that retrieving, viewing or responding to emails that tell you "A Friend Has Sent You An On-line Greeting Card" (or survey, invitation or anything else that you are supposed to respond to, visit or retreive) simply verifies that your email address is valid, and this will most likely result in more spam sent to you in the future!

Finally, a number of commercial services offer to place graphics and animations into your outgoing emails, and for free. Sounds like a great deal, right? What few (if any) users realize is that these "free" animations and graphics place tracking codes in each and every email you send! Not only do these "bugged" messages know your address, but they also collect the addresses of each and every person you email. Using such services effectively converts your personal address book into one big "verified" email address list.

Should You "Unsubscribe?"

The typical Spam email contains removal instructions so that you can presumably get off of the sender's marketing list. However, unless the message originates from a reputable web site, requesting removal of your email address will likely result in receiving more junk email, not less.

Reputable companies cannot afford to go back on their word, so if Yahoo, Amazon or Kmart is sending you promotional email and you want off, go ahead and follow the removal instructions. Such firms will most likely honor your request.

On the other hand, if the spam is from some company or organization you've never heard of (usually pushing products or services of dubious value) then you probably don't want to send a reply of any sort. To do so would simply enhance the market value of your email address, as you're now what they refer to as "verified" email address.

Instead of being removed from the junk marketer's list, your reply simply proved that your email account is both valid and active. As a result, your address will most likely be sold to (and used by) spam marketers even more often than before!

Problems With "Catch-all Aliasing"

If you have your own domain, then you should verify that your host does not enable "catch-all" or "default" email addressing on your account.

If enabled, this would allow a spammer or virus to send to any fictional address at your domain, and your host will deliver the message to a "default" account. The result is that a spammer could send email to:

- a@yourdomain.com
- ab@yourdomain.com
- abc@yourdomain.com
- abcd@yourdomain.com

And every other variation they care to try. If you find that you're receiving countless copies of the exact same spam emails, and you have your own domain, then this type of aliasing may be the problem.

What Are False-Positives?

Anti-spam systems often block the delivery of legitimate email. When this happens, the blocked message is referred to as a "false-positive" result.

As it turns out, stopping Spam is not nearly as difficult as avoiding false-positives results. Eliminating false-positives is the most difficult problem for email recognition and filtering technologies, and is what separates the OnlyMyEmail system from the rest.

Every spam filtering system or technique will create false-positives, and especially with regards to automated notifications, mass-mailed commercial newsletters and "legitimate" direct marketing. This is unavoidable simply because these systems seldom verify that the addresses they're sending to are legitimate, or that the recipients specifically requested such promotional emails in the first place.

The real measure of performance and accuracy when it comes to blocking legitimate email is the "critical false-positive" which can be loosely defined as the blocking of human to human correspondence. Few users really care if a newsletter is delayed or deleted by their spam filtering, as long as such instances can be easily corrected. On the other hand, the delay or deletion of personal or business communication can often have significant negative consequences, such as missed appointments, lost opportunities or damaged relationships.

In most comparative analysis, a critical false-positive rate of under 1% is usually considered to be exceptionally good. But, even as a "best case scenario" imagine the business consequences that would result from blocking even one out of every hundred emails from legitimate prospects, customers and clients, let alone the ramifications of blocking even more - as most systems will.

By contrast, OnlyMyEmail's technology was developed specifically to address the "critical false-positive" problem, and this is one of the benefits that distinguishes our service from other available solutions. In fact, OnlyMyEmail's critical false-positive rate is currently less than 10 per million emails. Importantly, this is not a "lab result" but is measured from our real-world production environment for clients who have been using our system for at least 14 days.

Further, in many of these cases, the false-positive was caused by having a friend forward an actual spam email to our user, or by purchasing products from known spammers (yes, this does happen). Even then, while these conditions may cause such emails to be blocked by our system, users can easily retrieve these emails and can also instruct OnlyMyEmail to allow future emails from the sender at the same time.